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ILO: 4 Million Enslaved in Russia

A report published Thursday by the International Labor Organization said that 80 percent of an estimated 5 million illegal immigrants in Russia are involved in forced labor.

The report, titled "Forced Labor in Contemporary Russia," is the first in a worldwide campaign to raise awareness of the problem.

It documents examples and forms of forced labor, including forced labor in Russia mainly involving illegal immigrants from the former Soviet republics and Southeast Asia, Russian nationals suffering forced labor abroad and cases of forced labor involving migrants traveling to other countries.

Typical cases described include those of a teenage girl from Kazakhstan who ended up a sex slave and a man from Ukraine working to pay off a debt. They both came to Russia to earn money for their families.

The report was commissioned by the ILO under a special program against forced labor, started in 2002 to help member countries fight what the organization termed "modern slavery."

Program director Roger Plant told a Moscow news conference Thursday that the report shows how human traffickers sell people not only for sex, but also for labor exploitation.

Besides Russia, researchers have been working in Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Turkey and Japan, he said.

The girl, who was identified only as being a 15-year-old from Kazakhstan, told researchers in an interview in Omsk that she had fled servitude in Moscow.

The eldest of five children, her father sold her for $200 to a man who faked documents and brought her across the border as his daughter.

The man resold her to an owner of a luxury villa outside of Moscow where she worked scrubbing and washing dishes. She was repeatedly raped there, the report said.

After surviving for a while on scraps of leftover food, the girl was told that she owed money for her transportation from Kazakhstan. During a drunken party at the villa, she managed to escape.

In exchange for sex, a truck driver gave the girl a lift to Omsk, near the Kazakh border. Without identification papers, she was trying to find a way to return home.

In the case of the man from Ukraine working to pay off a debt, he was forced to give his employers in Stavropol his passport and a written promise to pay back the $200 they had spent to bring him into the country.

But his 12-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week construction job did not pay enough for him to pay off the money, the report said.

"If you refuse to do the work, they can beat you," he was quoted as saying in the report. "And you can't leave anywhere without a passport. Besides, they can also threaten your family."

Boris Soshenko, head of the Construction Workers' Union, said Thursday that the employment of illegal immigrants cuts the cost of a construction project by two-thirds. He said Russian workers would not do the same jobs because the pay was so low.

The report's chief researcher, Yelena Tyuryukanova of the Russian Academy of Sciences, blamed the authorities and society in general for turning a blind eye to forced labor. "The tolerance of this kind of exploitation has reached monstrous proportions," she said.

The report said that some of the victims interviewed by the ILO had turned to police for help, but they had returned runaways to their employers.

Plant said that Ireland, the Netherlands and Britain, the program's sponsors, have provided $1 million to fight forced labor in Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Pauline Barrett-Reid, director of the ILO team for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, said the money would mainly fund a public awareness campaign over the next two years.

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